Session 3 · Week 3

Polish & Your Year In Film

This is where Reel stops feeling like an exercise and starts feeling like a real app. We'll add ratings and reviews, build the dashboard, make everything look professional, and — importantly — learn how to talk to Claude effectively when things don't work first time.

What we'll cover

  • Ratings, reviews, and notes for each item
  • Building the dashboard — your year in film at a glance
  • A "Popular this week" page pulled live from TMDB
  • Making the app look great on a phone as well as a laptop
  • AI prompting mastery — how to get better results, faster
  • What to do when something breaks (it always breaks sometimes)

What you'll achieve

By the end of this session:

  • You can rate everything you've watched and write short reviews
  • You have a dashboard you'll actually want to show people
  • Your app looks good on phone, tablet, and laptop
  • You know how to communicate with AI when the first attempt isn't right
  • You can read an error and fix it without panicking

About your dashboard

By the end of the session, your dashboard will tell you things like:

  • How many films and shows you've watched this year
  • Your average rating
  • Your top genres
  • What you've watched most recently
  • The longest film or show you've sat through

This is the page you'll screenshot and send to friends.

New concepts

  • Component — a reusable piece of your app, like a button or a card
  • Responsive design — the same app looking good on phone and laptop
  • The iterate-refine loop — how good results actually happen (rarely on the first try)

Before next session

  • Add anything else you want — be brave, experiment
  • Rate the films and shows you've added so the dashboard fills up
  • Note anything that's broken or not quite right, so we can fix it together in session four